> Just a thought. Anyone else have any of those concerning the
> parallels between Minitel and L-mode? -Nik Frengle
I think there's no true technology parallel at all, although I
understand the conceptual link. L-mode is the very poor relation to
i-mode for exactly the reason you cite: people just don't feel a need to
upgrade their voice phones more than once or twice each decade or two.
If they do feel the need, they've probably got cellphones anyway.
The British equivalent of Minitel is probably simply Teletext, with TV
being the downlink and the telephone being the non-real-time uplink.
Minitel probably succeeded because it was a trivial expense. Teletext
succeeded because it was a trivial expense (i.e., free) and arrived with
the new TV whether you needed it or not.
I've done some work with all of these technologies, and the models that
work seem to be the ones that don't assume the consumer will
automagically decide to upgrade to them and additionally support the
costs involved.bv
Received on Wed May 14 17:26:21 2003